College applicants should be measured by true grit

Published
4:16 pm CST, Wednesday, March 9, 2016

If a biotech researcher developed a drug that could reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, few people would care if the motivation was a love of mankind, a love of science or the desire to make a fortune. Why should they? All sorts of people do good and bad in the world for all sorts of reasons.

That thought comes to mind because of a new report from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which offers some troubling recommendations for how colleges and universities should rethink admissions.

The report, “Turning the Tide,” rightly calls for leveling the playing field so that wealthy applicants don’t have so much of an advantage over lower-income students. That’s definitely a worthwhile objective. But the report’s main goal is in its subtitle: “Inspiring Concern for Others and the Common Good through College Admissions.” More than 70 deans of admissions and other college leaders have endorsed it.

According to the report, students show too much concern about their own futures and not enough about serving the community. But even if that’s true, is it the job of college admissions departments to right that wrong? The report recommends tweaking admissions to favor applicants who have shown a serious, years-long commitment to a local cause over those who have dabbled in various kinds of community service at home or abroad. It also calls for reducing the importance of advanced high-school classes and SAT scores, and giving more credit to applicants who hold part-time jobs and who help out at home.

On the surface, those changes sound appealing. Certainly, for too long students have gotten points in college admissions for displaying “leadership” and “global awareness” by going on expensive overseas trips that combine socializing and adventure tours with a volunteer project.

Yes, of course colleges should downgrade meaningless resume-polishing that clearly can be done only by the affluent. But it’s another matter for colleges to attempt social engineering through the admissions process. Do we really want admissions officers making glib moral judgments about which types of community service are inherently more worthy than others? Or decreeing that a student who tries several different kinds of volunteer work — or spends extra hours on chemistry experiments or writes short stories instead of feeding the hungry or craves the challenge of multiple Advanced Placement exams — is less deserving of a college education than one who works for several years on a local cause?

If colleges really want more authentic applications from students and less stress and burnout in high school, they should stop insisting on “well-rounded” candidates who do everything perfectly. Instead, they should credit students for whatever it is they do that truly reflects themselves and that might make them successful when they get to college. That might be writing short stories late into the night or holding down a regular part-time job or getting involved in a meaningful extracurricular activity.

Colleges could de-emphasize essays, which can be polished by expensive private college counselors, and give added weight to letters of recommendations.